The Veteran and the Newcomer: Inside the 2025/26 HYROX Season with R.A.D’s Lauren Weeks and Sinead Bent
With origins as a CrossFit-exclusive brand, R.A.D has expanded over the past few years to support athletes in other sports, including skateboarding, running, surfing, and HYROX. Currently, their roster is diverse, celebrating fitness in its many forms.
- With the 2026 HYROX season underway, Elite 15 athletes Lauren Weeks and Sinead Bent have been training, competing, and strategizing as the World Championships in June approach.
Remind Me
In addition to the many races held worldwide each year, HYROX has four Majors. This year, two have passed – Hamburg, Germany, in October and Melbourne, Australia, in December.
Two upcoming majors are in Phoenix, AZ, at the end of January and Warsaw, Poland, in mid-April.
- Racers seeking to compete in the Elite 15 Division at the World Championships must finish in the top three in the Elite Division at one of the Majors to qualify. This requirement also applies to those competing in the Elite Doubles Division.
On a recent episode of The R.A.D Tapes, the crew sat down with Weeks in her home in Las Vegas, NV, and with Bent in Hebden Bridge, England, to catch up with them both.
Lauren Weeks
Although the three-time World Champion didn’t end the 2025 season on top of the podium, Weeks looks back on last season as being her most successful.
- “I performed significantly better than I expected in a lot of the races. I won three out of the four majors, and then I took second at one of the majors and third at Worlds. I didn’t go into (Worlds) feeling super great, so third place was better than I thought I was going to finish,” Weeks said.
In 2023, Weeks and her husband began The Hybrid Engine, a program they use as a blueprint for Weeks’ own training and for other HYROX athletes, more than 10 of whom hold Elite 15 status.
- “Our training is very much CrossFit. There’s a lot of carryover in CrossFit. I don’t think I would be as good if I didn’t do (CrossFit). If I were to only train HYROX movements, I wouldn’t be better, and I would be missing a lot of different pieces of building a good fitness base,” Weeks said.
For those that don’t know, Weeks was a CrossFitter long before she raced HYROX.
She began CrossFit while lifeguarding in New York. Her fellow guards were into the sport, and her interest piqued. She joined a gym and was hooked from day one. She qualified for regionals in 2016 and again in 2017.
- “I loved competing at Regionals, but the difference is that I’m so confident in my ability to perform where I need to for HYROX, whereas when I stepped into CrossFit, I couldn’t physically do some of the things, and that caused a lot of anxiety,” she said.
She vividly remembers competing alongside Camille LeBlanc-Bazinet and being unable to complete the handstand-walking obstacles, which was demoralizing. She knew she had a lot of work to do if she wanted to pursue CrossFit as a professional competitor.
But she found her groove in hybrid fitness instead, starting with obstacle course racing like Spartan and then HYROX.
Sinead Bent
Newcomer Bent has made a big splash in a short time.
Running has always been her first love, and she never thought she’d leave it. She only recently discovered HYROX in 2024. Her first event was in May of that year at HYROX London.
- She won, with a time that put her eighth in the world in her division. With friends and her partner encouraging her to pursue the sport seriously, she went all in shortly after.
At the time, she had a full-time job as a physical therapist, and while she loved running, she wasn’t quite ready for the life shift that it takes to become a professional athlete. But her friends encouraged her to compete, and she qualified for Worlds via the Last Chance Qualifier.
- At the World Championships in Chicago, she missed the podium by one spot, taking fourth place with a time of 1:00.22, 39 seconds behind Weeks, who took third.
This season, Bent toed the line in Melbourne in December in an attempt to qualify as an Elite Woman, but finished fifth. She has two chances left to secure a qualifying spot.
Looking Ahead
Weeks has already qualified via Hamburg, the first Major of the season, both as an individual and as an Elite 15 Doubles participant. However, Weeks is forfeiting her Doubles qualification earned with partner Lauren Griffith, who is recovering from injury. Weeks will attempt to qualify again, this time with Vivian Tafuto in either Phoenix or Warsaw instead.
Bent’s status is the opposite: she holds a qualification in the Elite Doubles with partner Lucy Proctor, but still needs to earn her spot in the Elite Women Division. She will be competing at Phoenix and perhaps Warsaw.
World Championships are scheduled for June 18-21 in Stockholm, Sweden.
